


Neck and Neck

by arenoseAnima



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Assassins, F/F, Gen, Incest
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-07-05
Updated: 2012-07-05
Packaged: 2017-11-09 06:38:28
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,426
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/452436
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/arenoseAnima/pseuds/arenoseAnima
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Rose and Roxy fall prey to shenanigans at a horse race. (Written for Round 1: Gambling.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	Neck and Neck

“Five hundred on Cerulean Beauty,” Roxy tells the bookie. Rose doesn’t have time to scrape her jaw off the floor before the transaction is done and done, five hundred dollars of her advance on _Complacency of the Learned Book I: Calmasis Alone_ down the horse-scented drain. The bookie tucks the money into his esoteric filing system and gives Roxy a bored, glassy-eyed smile before he waves her on; she trots away with the peculiar delight of the completely fucking oblivious, her fingers still laced with Rose’s as Rose has a quiet mental apocalypse.

“I am going to kill you,” says Rose, even though Roxy sure isn’t listening. “I am going to kill you with such exacting thoroughness that I will, in turn, be eradicated from the timeline. The shockwaves of my Oedipal-Electral reacharound slaughter will mow Dave and Dirk to the ground as goats mow the grass, and the world will weep for the absence of the Lalonde-Strider clan. The realms of the arts will never recover from our shocking loss, geniuses plucked from the earth before we even had a chance to shine. We will be enshrined alongside Keats in the halls of lost brilliance, and all because you wasted our money on an equine folly. I was going to _use_ that money, Roxy. I _needed_ it.”

“Put the shoosh on your rumble spheres, Rosalina. I got it all handled. We are gonna be rolling in the dough.”

Roxy stops at a stand to obtain a red Solo cup full of the lowest-quality beer Rose has ever smelled; she briefly wonders if it might be _actual_ horse piss, then abandons that train of thought with the alacrity of a flaming engine driver.

She decides that this will be what she is remembered for, in the end: losing all her money to a lush of an ecto-paramour who insists on spending it on horses and horse accessories. Roxy offers her a sip; she takes it with reflexive gratefulness, then chokes and spits beer all over the floor. “Oh my god,” Roxy says. “Oh my god, and you say you can’t take _me_ anywhere. What is even your problem?”

“ _You are my problem_.”

“I told you, we’re gonna be comin’ up roses. Just so long as you don’t get us kicked out for spitting shit all over the floor. For real, who taught you manners? Oh, wait.” Roxy grimaces at her cup. “Dammit.”

“I’m glad you’ve come to terms with your faulty parenting and your even faultier relationship management skills. You know I hate beer.”

“You’re the one who drank it! I just offered!”

“You are completely intolerable. Where are our seats, or do you plan on spending our entire date leading me around a dark maze full of rodeo clowns and mobsters?”

In lieu of answering, Roxy tugs Rose down into the stands. Rose allowed Roxy to spend the other portion of her advance - a _budgeted_ expense - on seats near the front row, so they could both admire the horses. She had fully expected to while away the race itself in a daydream of brushing the heaving, sweaty flanks of some majestic courser, but now, _now_ she’s going to be trembling with fiduciary anxiety the whole time. Thanks, Roxy.  

“Wait,” says Roxy, and stops right in the middle of the staircase. Rose bumps into her back. There is very nearly an Incident, but Rose catches Roxy by the waist and holds her in place. “Look, there’s some assrag in our seat.” Roxy fishes their pair of ticket stubs out of her bra and consults them;  Rose leans over her shoulder. The seats are the very same which are partially occupied by a man who seems to be under the impression that sunglasses and a baseball cap are an appropriate fashion choice for the kind of overcast day that threatens to wash out the race entire.

Rose cups a hand around her mouth and begins to call out to the hooligan who has parked his beer-soggy fundament over half of their seating arrangement. Roxy, lacking in the kind of inborn courtesies that would lead a young woman to shout over the heads of a bunch of spectators, storms down the stairs to their row, shouting “hey, asshole!” all the way. It’s all Rose can do to follow her rather than melt into the crowd and perhaps bite down on her cyanide-impregnated molar. Every profanity is followed by a handful of “I’m sorry” and “please pardon her, she’s drunk” thrown like rice at a wedding.

Roxy’s infuriated screeches (“This was supposed to be a _nice date_ , you piece of shit! I am gonna rip your stupid hat off and give you an emergency field enema!”) don’t seem to rouse her unfortunate victim any more than does the uncomfortable shuffling of the people around him. The sight of an infuriated Lalonde blotting out the sun with her hands on her hips is enough to make even Jade “Hellmurder Island” Harley pray for a swift death, but the man in the seat remains oblivious. And when Roxy grabs the brim of his hat and yanks it off, he doesn’t even twitch.

It does reveal the quarter-sized hole in his forehead, though.

“Oh fuck,” Roxy shrieks. Rose is lagging a few steps behind; by the time she gets there, Roxy is already babbling “oh shit, oh shit, is this like putting a dead guy in a horse’s bed, I mean, fuck, fuck, _fuck_!” like she hasn’t been personally responsible for punching countless limbs off of equally countless underlings.

All Rose can manage upon seeing the Horrible Truth is a strangled yelp. No blood runs from the hole - in fact, it looks like someone has carefully wiped his face clean; there’s a vague scent of lemon.

“Well,” Rose says. “This does somewhat put a damper on things.” She emits a high, choked bark of laughter. “What do you propose we...?” The last dead body Rose saw, that didn’t get up again afterwards, was her mother’s.

Fortunately for her, Rose’s corpsey conundrum is rendered moot by the sudden and companionable clamp of a hand on her and Roxy’s shoulders. “I didn’t expect to see you guys here!” says a voice that is far too bubbly for the situation. “If I had known I would have picked a different seat!”

Rose and Roxy turn around, goggle-eyed; standing there, immaculate in a black suit and a squiddle-patterned tie, a rifle strapped over her back, is Jade “Hellmurder Island” Harley. She gives the Lalondes the kind of charming grin that makes one forget its bearer is armed to the buck teeth. There’s blood on her glasses.

“You’ve got red on you,” says Roxy stupidly. Jade blinks and wipes at her glasses, which only smears the blood. As she takes them off to clean them on a crusty maroon rag she fishes from some well-hidden pocket, a bunch of words stagger out of Rose’s mouth like drunks piling out of a bar at closing time. “You put him here? Is that what you’re saying?”

Jade rolls her eyes as she slides her glasses back on. “Gee, give me a little credit, Rosie!”  She leans in with a conspiratorial waggle of the eyebrows and brings Rose and Roxy together to better whisper to them. “I killed him!”

“Oh my god,” Roxy gurgles. “I think I’m gonna pass out.”

Jade scoffs. “Come on! I told you two I had a new job I couldn’t tell you about, didn’t I?” She frowns. “You weren’t listening, were you.”

“I think we were texting,” Roxy says weakly.

“You were sitting right next to each other!” Jade slaps her hands against the sides of Rose and Roxy’s heads, knocking them against one another, and the two unfortunate girls pull back to huff and groan and gripe. “You guys are terrible.” She pauses. “Hey, now that you know I’m totally a mob assassin, want to help me carry this dead guy out of here? There’s still a good half an hour before the race, you’ll make it back in time.”

The only response Rose can muster is a single “what” like a tooth in the sink; Roxy is struck entirely silent.

“Awesome!” Jade brooks no argument as she shoulders past the Lalondes and slings one of the dead man’s arms over her shoulders. She snatches his hat from Roxy’s fingers and puts it back on him, covering the hole in his head and shading his tender skin from the harsh rays of the sun. “Rose, you get his other arm. Roxy, you’re on Weekend at Bernie’s duty.”

While Jade and Rose hoist their temporarily incapacitated buddy up on their shoulders, Roxy picks her way through the crowd and informs them that if they don’t get out of the way soon they’re going to be right in the path of a guy who had lobster Thermidor for breakfast chased with half a bottle of vodka.

They clear out pretty quickly.

The kind of people who attend mob-related horse races do not intersect with the kind of people who enjoy washing lobster vomit out of their Armani suits, so Roxy’s ploy works.

 At least it does until they happen upon a passel of wide-shouldered figures each sporting either pistols or very large inhalers beneath their jackets. They block the hallway with their sheer bulk, and Jade gasps as she almost drops the corpse.

“Hi,” she says, her voice suddenly high. “Um, we’re Blossom, Bubbles, and Buttercup, and - “

“ _Really_?” Rose hisses. “You think they watch _Powerpuff Girls_?” She raises her voice. “We’re Clotho, Lachesis, and...” Ah. The other one. Her brain falters for a moment, and she’s left gesticulating with the corpse’s hand.

“I’m Buttercup,” Roxy supplies. That seems to be the wrong answer, because two of the four jacketed mobsters draw their guns.

Jade’s a faster draw than either of them even with the arm she has to discard. Rose and Roxy aren’t far behind, needles and rifle pointed at the two unarmed mobsters. Bernie collapses to the floor in a heap; he seems to have no weapons with which to threaten. With all the cards laid out on the metaphorical beer-stained table, the two remaining thugs have time to  pull out their pistols as though they’re presenting the weapons for appraisal.

“You killed Bernie,” says the one who seems to be the leader - at least, she has the bigger gun.

“Finally!” says Jade. She waggles her rifle in sheer excitement. Rose leans out of the way as the barrel veers a bit too near. “Some credit! Yes! What are you people going to _do_ about it, though?”

“Well,” says the leader, “we have these guns.” She shrugs, her jacket bunching around her neck before she shoots her sleeves.

While Jade is providing witty banter for some unseen audience, Rose looks to Roxy to signal that they should get the hell out of there, or at least to communicate some sort of moral support, but to her dismay she's disappeared. The space formerly occupied by the other Lalonde is now filled only with particles of sawdust and horse poop.

Rose is too busy panicking to notice the movement behind the quartet of goons, but her attention is once more grabbed by the short hairs when a crow of “Rogue of Void, motherfuckers!” breaks the dull buzz of awkward pre-shootout conversation. One thug goes down, then the other, and the other two don’t turn around quickly enough to block the haymaker to both their jaws. The blur of fists and scarf settles down into a grinning, panting Roxy who is still, for some reason, holding her rifle.

“Oh,” says Rose.

“Oh,” says Jade. She looks down at the pile of unconscious hooligans. “Did you kill them?”

“You’re pretty bloodthirsty, Harley!”

“I’m just checking!” Jade huffs, slinging her gun back over her shoulder. “Pick him up again, Rose. We’re gonna be late.”

Rose can’t muster much protest, being that she’s still tongue-tied in kneetrembling delight with the knowledge that her girlfriend has Still Got It.

It turns out that there’s no oneleft on the way outside, so Roxy’s decoy duties are not needed and she’s free to sling an arm around Rose’s waist and chatter away about how badass they all are.

From there it’s a simple matter of loading the dead man into the trunk of the black sedan that’s waiting for them outside. The driver rolls down the tinted window and gives the trio a bright wave - it’s Jane Crocker.

Jade bends down and gives her a kiss on the head; Rose and Roxy avert their eyes and intertwine their fingers.

Jade gives both of them a bone-crushing hug before she gets into the passenger seat. “You guys were great!” she tells them. “I’m sorry you got all tangled up in that! But don’t worry, I bet those jerks won’t even remember when they wake up. And me and Jane will make sure nothing else happens!” Her brows furrow. “Hey, I hope you didn’t miss the race. Maybe you should get going. I’ll call!” she shouts after the Lalondes as they dash off.

As fast as Roxy is -- Rose lags behind, already tired from hauling a full-grown man and not in the best of shapes to begin with, no matter Roxy’s bedroom babblings -- they don’t make it past the concessions area before the intercom tootles louder than ever and begins to list off the horses, the last to cross the finish line first. Rose stops in her tracks; Roxy sees her look of crushed disappointment at once and joins her near the wall. Her arms go around Rose.

“Hey,” she whispers. “Hey. Hey Rosie.”

“What? Please excuse me, I’m still in mourning for the remains of the day.”

“What has four legs and makes Jake all sweaty?”

Rose pauses. “...a perambulatory skull?”

Roxy grins and shakes her head. The intercom blares with triumph as the announcer belts, “And in first, _Cerulean Beauty_!”

Rose’s jaw drops. “How did you - ?”

“A lady never reveals her secrets!” Roxy says, and slaps her hand onto Rose’s bottom. The look Rose gives her could fry an entire ovary. “You’re a Seer!” Roxy amends hastily. “I just picked the one that’d piss you off the most!”

Rose shuffles this information around in her head, then decides it makes about as much sense as the rest of Roxy’s admissions. “Fine,” she says, “but if you were wrong - well. Count yourself lucky. Very lucky.”

“I do, stupid!” Roxy leaves a smudgy lipstick print on Rose’s cheek as Rose tries to swat her away, laughing.


End file.
